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Quantum mechanics is one of the most fascinating elements of the physics curriculum, but its conceptual nuances and mathematical complexity can be daunting for beginning students. This user-friendly text is designed for a one-semester course which bridges the gap between sophomore-level treatments and advanced undergraduate/lower-graduate courses. Qualitative explanations and descriptions of historical background are combined with detailed mathematical analyses to help students establish a firm foundation for further study. Classical problems such potential wells, barrier penetration, alpha decay, the harmonic oscillator, and the hydrogen atom are examined in detail, and formalisms and techniques such as operators, expectation values, commutators, perturbation theory, numerical solutions, and the variational theorem are also covered. Particular emphasis is placed on providing numerous worked examples and exercises.
List of contents
Foundations.- Schrödinger's equation.- Schrödinger's Equation in One Dimension.- Operators, Expectation Values, and Various Quantum Theories.- The Harmonic Oscillator.- Schrödinger's equation in Three Dimensions and the Quantum Theory of Angular Momentum.- Central Potentials.
About the author
Bruce Cameron Reed earned a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 1984. His doctoral work was in observational astronomy, a study of the distribution of stars in the Puppis direction of the Milky Way. Just before formally finishing his graduate work, he became a faculty member in the Department of Physics at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1983. There he continued to work in observational astronomy, and, in 1992, took up a position as Associate Professor of Physics at Alma College in Michigan.
At Alma he began to develop an interest in the history and physics of the Manhattan Project. This grew into his primary research focus, and has resulted in several dozen journal papers, five books (three with Springer, one of which has gone into a third edition), and the teaching of a general-education class on the development of nuclear weapons. Prof. Reed was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2009 in recognition of his work on the Manhattan Project, served as Editor of the APS's Physics & Society newsletter (2009-13), and as Secretary-Treasurer of the Society's Forum on History of Physics (2013-19).
In 2010 Prof. Reed was appointed one of six Charles A. Dana Professors at Alma, and in 2017 named an "Alumni of Honour" at Waterloo. He formally retired at the end of 2017 and returned to the Halifax area, where he continues to teach part-time, serves as an Associate Editor with the American Journal of Physics, and does occasional consulting work.
